ABOUT

Born in 1965, Tripoli, Lebanon and currently lives and works in Sydney, Australia.

Education, Master of Arts, Time Based Art major at COFA, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

Khaled Sabsabi’s process involves working across art mediums, geographical borders and cultures to create immersive and engaging art experiences. He see’s art as an effective tool to communicate with people, through a familiar language. Sabsabi makes work that questions; rationales and complexities of nationhood, identity and change. His practice speaks to audiences in ways that enlighten our understanding of universal dynamics which is more complex and ultimately more unknowable than our own selves.

Khaled was awarded the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship in 2010, 60th Blake Prize in 2011, MCG Basil Sellers fellowship in 2014, the Fishers Ghost Prize in 2014 and the Western Sydney ARTS NSW Fellowship 2015. He is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane and has 14 works in private, national and international collections. He has also participated in the 3rd Kochi Biennale, 1st Yinchuan Biennale, 5th Marrakech Biennale, 18th Biennale of Sydney, 9th Shanghai Biennale and Sharjah Biennial 11.

‘I am a socially-engaged artist who’s worked in detention centres, schools, prisons, refugee and settlements camps, hospitals and youth centres, in the Australian, Arab and broader international context.

I began my creative life in the mid 80’s as a socially-engaged Hip-Hop performer and since then have artistically evolved to develop and produce numerous art presentations. I migrated with my family to Australia in 1978 due to civil war and in 2001 I reconnected to Lebanon and the surrounding region for the first time since migration and today continue to engage with the region regularly.

I make work that is in continual transfer from the local to the global, from the physical to the philosophical and back again, to interconnect the interrelatedness and cycles of daily life’.